May 7, 2025, Story by: Publisher
Thirteen civil rights complaints filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including one targeting pollution from industrial poultry operations, are currently in limbo—raising concerns from environmental justice advocates and residents in affected communities.
The complaints, which span multiple states, allege that federally funded agencies failed to protect communities—often low-income and predominantly Black, Latino, or Indigenous—from environmental hazards. These include the effects of massive poultry farms, industrial waste, and toxic emissions that contribute to degraded air and water quality. Many of the complaints invoke Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination based on race, color, or national origin by recipients of federal funding.
“This is a rural part of the state where the majority of folks rely on well water for drinking water, and a lot of people just don’t trust their water. They live close to hog operations. Their water tastes funny,” says Blakely Hildebrand, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, who is representing the North Carolina NAACP and North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign.
At the center of the controversy is an informal directive issued during President Trump’s second term, which weakened the EPA’s authority to act on civil rights complaints. The directive imposed strict procedural requirements and discouraged the use of informal resolution agreements, long a critical tool for addressing community concerns without protracted litigation. As a result, the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights has largely been restricted from accepting new complaints or resolving existing ones, despite rising concerns about environmental discrimination.
There are currently 30 active civil rights complaints at various stages of the EPA’s process for reviewing, investigating, and resolving alleged violations of Title VI, filed by largely Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities across the country to seek relief from environmental contamination and health hazards.
These include Black and Indigenous residents in North Carolina surrounded by hog and poultry farms that spill animal waste into the rivers and groundwater, Black residents in Port Arthur, Texas living near a Koch-owned plant that rains sulfur that coats their neighborhoods in yellow and black dust and a Black neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut that suffers from flooding and sewage overflow every summer — to name just a few of the communities still awaiting justice before the EPA.
Compared to the EPA’s environmental justice offices, which have placed 160 employees on paid leave, the agency’s Office of External Civil Rights Compliance (OECRC) has remained mostly in-tact: two probationary employees were terminated and then placed on administrative leave; a student intern was terminated; one employee resigned willingly and another employee has been reinstated after being erroneously terminated for environmental justice activities, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
One of the most high-profile complaints involves residents of North Carolina’s Duplin County, where industrial poultry and hog farms are densely concentrated. Residents have reported chronic respiratory problems, contaminated well water, and unbearable odors linked to nearby Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Advocates argue that the state’s permitting and regulatory practices disproportionately harm communities of color and violate their civil rights under Title VI.
According to investigative reporting by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, these complaints—filed between 2021 and 2023—have seen little to no movement, and affected communities have received scant communication from the EPA. Despite the Biden administration’s vocal support for environmental justice, the agency has not yet reversed the Trump-era directive, effectively paralyzing its civil rights enforcement mechanisms.
Environmental and civil rights groups, including Earthjustice and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, have criticized the agency’s inaction. They say the delay not only violates communities’ legal rights but also allows harmful environmental practices to persist unchecked in areas already burdened by health disparities and economic disadvantage.
Marianne Engelman Lado, a veteran environmental justice advocate and former EPA official, expressed concern over the situation, stating, “It is particularly sad to see this wrecking ball aimed at environmental justice. It will not be successful. The communities that are overburdened are going to continue the struggle for justice, and many states will pick up the ball.”
While the EPA has signaled interest in revisiting the guidance, no formal rollback or new policy has been issued. In the meantime, residents living in the shadow of polluting industries remain stuck in a holding pattern—waiting for an agency built to protect them to fulfill its mandate.
The complaint challenges the permitting of four new operations to collect methane from the lagoons and use it as “biofuel,” injecting it into natural gas pipelines. While billed as an environmental solution by the hog industry, the complainants contend that “industry-sponsored biogas projects exacerbate this long-standing environmental injustice by increasing the risks of the polluting lagoon and sprayfield system.” Three of the operations are sponsored by Align RNG, a joint venture of Smithfield Foods and Dominion Energy.
“You can’t let your children go outside and play like you should because of the air in Duplin and Sampson Counties,” says Deborah Maxwell, the president of the North Carolina NAACP. “Talking about particulate matter going across people’s yards, the inability to even sit outside and hang your clothes out, which is a Southern tradition.”
Hildebrand says that she’s received “no indication” from the EPA that they are no longer engaged in the information resolution processes, and she remains “hopeful” about reaching a resolution. “We are proceeding as we have been until we hear otherwise from EPA,” she says
The agency has long struggled with fully enforcing this provision of the Civil Rights Act — just take a glance at where waste incinerators are located in every U.S. city, the communities in Alabama’s ‘Black Belt’ still lacking access to sanitation services, the hog farms in North Carolina that are more than four times likely to be sited in a Black community — but now the future of the agency’s Title VI enforcement is even more uncertain as the Trump Administration launches an attack on civil rights, which it tends to call DEI, across agencies.
In North Carolina, the EPA is in the process of negotiating with the state’s environmental agency over a complaint concerning the permitting of hog farms. These farms are highly concentrated in a region known as the Black Belt, which the complaint describes as “the crescent-shaped swath of dark, fertile soils stretching from Virginia to Mississippi where large numbers of African Americans were enslaved on plantations before the Civil War.” Many Black residents have lived along North Carolina’s eastern plains for generations, alongside Indigenous tribes.
But this region is becoming less and less livable as longtime residents become overcrowded by the more than 2,000 industrial hog operations in the area that raise around 9 million hogs. These many millions of hogs produce 10 billion gallons of waste per year, sprayed on fields as fertilizer, but in practice also seeping into the streams and groundwater supply. The waste is also flushed into open-air pits, known as lagoons, that emit methane, ammonia, and other pollutants.
Source: Investigate Midwest
